Rashomon: An Akira Kurosawa Movie, Based on a Ryunosuke Akutagawa Short Story, Based on a 12^th Century Japanese Tale, in Terms of Multiple Identity Literary Theory

The title of the short story, “In a Bamboo Grove,” tells where the rape and murder took place. The story consists of testimony by the various eyewitnesses. Since each eyewitness tells a very different story, the word “rashomon” is now used to mean that different people have different perspectives and that eyewitness testimony may be unreliable.

However, “rashomon” may have another meaning if we interpret the story in terms of Multiple Identity Literary Theory (discussed previously in this blog). According to this theory, the process of fiction writing involves the interaction of autonomous narrator and character identities.

Recall the posts in which I quoted how Toni Morrison and Stephen King controlled and pruned their independent-minded character-personalities. They had to control and prune them in order to keep everything consistent with the story that the narrator wanted to tell.

But what would happen if an author did not control or prune what the narrators and characters wanted to do or say? Suppose each identity were allowed to tell the story the way he or she wanted. Well, the result would be Rashomon.

Let me apply this meaning of “rashomon” to Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw.” Recall that in my post about that story, I concluded that it was not ambiguous, but rather was inconsistent, because it was written from more than one voice or perspective, which had not been controlled or pruned. If I wanted to review or critique that story using just one word, I could say: rashomon.